In my blog I share my learning curve about the 'new social learning'. I started with a focus on communities of practice, but there are many new forms of social learning emerging. I share personal experiences, articles and cases

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Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Sharing our inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference with links to all our liveblogs

Sibrenne and myself arrived last Friday at Rotterdam airport with a head full of inspiration from the Learning Technologies conference and fresh air from our walk along the Thames. In this blogpost we compile some reflections and provide links to all our liveblogs, so that you may choose which ones to read.
Something which struck us when we reflected on all different sessions:

People are aware of 70-20-10 and talk about it as if everybody should just know what it is. 70-20-10 is the model for learning in the workplace by Charles Jennings. However, the understanding of the 70 varies. For some doing things online means moving to the 70%, for me an online course is still in the 10%.

There were a lot of instructional designers in the group; professionals analyzing learning questions and developing learning programs. I was very much interested in their ideas about whether technology changes the work of instructional designers? Because I do think that people have much more influence on their own learning environment. Nowadays we are not that dependent of a course of training, anymore. When we have a question, we start googling or asking our network. My impression from this session and some conversations is that the core of instructional design (from needs analysis to training development) is still there. But the focus has become more on online, e-learning and in that sense on developing attractive assignments in a visual and creative way.

The big buzz is about 'beyond classroom training' and companies are taking various directions to go beyond classroom training. The directions are: social learning, mobile learning, learning from sharing videos, blended learning and serious games. Personally I've attended sessions with the experiences of larger organizations like Qualcomm, Marks & Spencers and Peugeot, and they have really moved beyond the idea of offering standard courses.

There are valuable case examples to listen to. In order to learn from these cases, I'm always curious to hear more about the underlying concepts and principles. From what learning perspective is an online learning initiative designed? What were important design principles? And I missed this level of reflection. Is that typical Dutch?

Interestingly, whether organizations invest in social learning or mobile learning or video doesn't seem to be driven by a thorough analysis but by a vision by somebody or a group within the organization. In some cases there is proof it works, in other cases the approach is to experiment.

A new topic is the use of wearable technology in a learning context. Think about digital watches or Google Glass. The technology is there, and now we have to think about the wat we can use it in our learning approaches. I found it inspiring and I truly believe in the fact that the technology is already there. What we need to do is experiment with it and think about possibilities to apply.... go!

Another topic that popped up in several sessions was the issue of big data or learning data. Many organisations are using a LMS in some way, and all these LMS's (as well as wearable technology) collect data. But what do we want to do with this data? How to link it with other data available? And how can we use data for performance improvement?

If you'd like to read our liveblogs, choose one or several of the 13 liveblogs below: